Books in brief: Surviving the '60s, drugs and all

BOOKS IN BRIEF

ROBERT CREMINS

Published 6:30 am, Sunday, March 11, 2007

Picking up novelist Robert Stone's memoir Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (Ecco, 240 pp. $25.95) it's hard not to think of Robin Williams' quip that if you remember the '60s you weren't really there. Well, Stone was there, big time, and he does remember, insightfully.

A decade, spiritually at least, is not necessarily 10 years' long. Stone bookends his story with contrasting accounts of his military experience. In 1958, he is a dutiful sailor on board a World War II-era ship that "entertained kamikazes at Okinawa." By 1971, both a published author and a veteran of the counterculture, he is a semi-embedded journalist witnessing the last ghastly stages of America's misadventure in Vietnam. The 13 years in between are Stone's '60s.

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The young writer's move west in 1962 is the point where the memoir's mood goes from Eisenhower black-and-white to psychedelic color. Crucially, Stone is awarded a Stegner Fellowship, his ticket into the literary hothouse of Stanford University.

Talent, however, isn't the only thing being grown in Northern California. Drugs are a major character in the story, at first benign, then progressively more sinister. Casualties of acid are as significant to Stone as casualties of war.

At Stanford, Stone befriends the man who comes to personify the flawed brilliance of the decade: Ken Kesey, then on a post-Cuckoo's Nest creative roll. Stone becomes a fellow traveler with Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters but retains enough discipline and distance to maintain his artistic vocation; other talents burn out. Mid-decade escapades such as a "high intensity" visit to Mexico give way to longer, stranger trips. Los Angeles in particular, in the grip of post-Manson family paranoia, is emblematic of the souring '60s dream.

Stone is unapologetic, defiant even, about the idealism of his generation, but his liberal commitment does not diminish his candor: Ultimately, he notes, "the prank was on us."

Poster child earns real identity in this accomplished memoir

ANOTHER new memoir of similar integrity and power, though utterly different in content, is Emily Rapp's Poster Child (Bloomsbury, 229 pp. $23.95). Rapp's childhood was broken in a most literal sense. Born with a congenital condition known as Proximal Focal Femoral Deficiency, she had her foot amputated just before turning 4 and grew up wearing a series of prosthetic limbs. These devices, often chafing, sometimes unreliable, are as much characters in her story as classmates and confidantes.

Rapp becomes the poster child of the title when she's chosen by the Wyoming chapter of the March of Dimes as their winsome representative. This is arguably the beginning of a false path, which she will follow for many years, to the destination of psychological wholeness.

Young Rapp's obsession with perfection leads her to a series of crises, some particular to her predicament, others all too familiar in the lives of teenage girls. It becomes almost an article of faith that "there was a beautiful prosthesis that would someday belong to me. Like Cinderella's magical slipper, this leg would make everything fairy-tale perfect."

That real unity lies within is a truism easier said than lived, and Rapp relates her personal growth in an unflinching yet warm, refreshing voice. Stints abroad, including a boozy good time in Dublin and an unsettling spell in Korea, provide their share of epiphanies, but Rapp has to come back home to fully inhabit herself and her story. Her vocation as writer, which she honed as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, is a key component in moving beyond the poster-child identity. That she has now consigned to the past, but she also meticulously remembers it in this accomplished first book.

Two tales intersect: one superficial, one substantial

LUCY Jackson's Posh (St. Martin's, 256 pp. $23.95) is a novel that could do with some Poster Child's unity. Lurking beneath the Lucy Jackson pseudonym is a distinguished writer, though few people, even in New York's inner publishing circles, are sure which one.

That has not stopped theories being forwarded as to why she (or he?) has gone the pseudonymous route. One is that no matter how much critical acclaim attaches to a writer's name, he or she is shackled, in booksellers' eyes, to the sales of the last title. So re-branding can be a savvy marketing move. Another theory holds that the world of the novel, a sort of teach-and-tell story set in an exclusive Manhattan prep school, is uncomfortably specific and recognizable.

Perhaps both theories are correct. Either way we have a novel suffering from an identity crisis. Two main stories, one superficial, the other substantial, intersect uneasily. The first is about the trials and tribulations, mostly self-imposed, of the headmistress of the Griffin School, Kathryn "Lazy" Hoffman. Griffin is the kind of school where if not the devil then at least the students and parents (who can be diabolical enough) wear Prada. In this atmosphere of overachievers and overspenders, Lazy feels reduced to being a "handmaiden to the rich and entitled" and wonders "isn't she too smart to be superficial?"

Well, yes, she is, and hence hardly worth the reader's time in her spineless interaction with these swaggering clichés.

More compelling is the story of Julianne Coopersmith, one of the few Griffin students not born with a platinum spoon in her mouth. She is forced into a maturity beyond her years dealing with the emotional blackmail of her bipolar boyfriend, Michael Avery.

The tightening psychological noose of Julianne and Michael's relationship is solid evidence of what Lucy Jackson, whoever she really is, can do. One wonders what signifier the novel is sending out that Julianne's mother, Dee, is an accomplished writer who has come to doubt her vocation. Then again, Posh is fiction, semisatisfying though it is.

Robert Cremins' novels include A Sort of Homecoming. He lives in Houston.